Source: Tendai Ruben Mbofana is Confusing Etymology for Ideology Every language has a graveyard of words that used to mean something specific and now mean whatever the room decides they mean. My dear mentor Tendai has just built an entire column on the false idea that words are haunted forever by wherever they were born, […] The post Tendai Ruben Mbofana is Confusing Etymology for Ideology appeared first on Zimbabwe Situation .
Source: Tendai Ruben Mbofana is Confusing Etymology for Ideology
Every language has a graveyard of words that used to mean something specific and now mean whatever the room decides they mean.
My dear mentor Tendai has just built an entire column on the false idea that words are haunted forever by wherever they were born, and that failing to research a phrase’s family tree before you say it is some kind of moral failure.
His latest piece accuses the Zimbabwean presidium of unknowingly endorsing LGBTQ+ ballroom culture because Mnangagwa said “clock it” at a youth event. It is a neat theory. Neat, because it lets him skip the harder question of whether origin actually controls meaning at all. [https://www.thezimbabwean.co/2026/09/so-how-did-an-lgbtq-term-find-its-way-to-the-zimbabwean-presidium-the-clock-it-controversy/]
It does not, and language proves this everywhere you look.
“Deadline” comes from American Civil War prison camps, where guards drew an actual line around the perimeter and shot any prisoner who crossed it. Editors around the world use the word every single day without summoning Andersonville.
“Running amok” comes from the Malay word for a specific and terrifying state of violent, murderous frenzy, tied to old beliefs about evil spirits. Today it describes a toddler knocking over a display in a shop.
“Rule of thumb” carries a persistent folk story about the width of a stick a man could legally use to beat his wife, and people who know that story still use the phrase to talk about baking times. Nobody accuses a pastry chef of endorsing domestic violence.
If Tendai’s logic held, half the English language would be a confession of hidden sympathies nobody actually holds.
Perhaps he would say those examples are too old, too faded, too fully absorbed into ordinary speech to count. Fine. Let’s stay recent, since recency is supposedly what makes “clock it” so damning.
“Based” is barely older than “clock it.” It comes out of hip-hop, popularised by the rapper Lil B in the late 2000s, itself flipped from “basehead,” slang for someone addicted to crack cocaine. Lil B took a word for a drug user and turned it into a badge of pride for being unapologetically yourself. Today, CID Narcotics officer can call a colleague’s blunt, no-nonsense police report “based” without anyone accusing him of secretly sympathising with the very addicts his agency is paid to arrest. Nobody researches that etymology before using the word, and nobody needs to, because the word has already left its origin behind in everyday use.
“Standing on business,” a phrase rooted firmly in Black American vernacular and now used everywhere from corporate LinkedIn posts to church sermons, carries no controversy at all, despite being just as recent and just as tied to a specific originating community as “clock it.” A Fortune 500 chief executive can post it under a quarterly earnings chart and nobody blinks.
So why does “clock it” get the Tendai treatment while “based” and “standing on business” get a free pass? Because only one of them lets him land a satisfying gotcha against a government that has spent decades preaching against homosexuality. That is not a principle. That is a pattern-match, applied selectively to the one case where the irony is too tasty to resist, and quietly abandoned everywhere else it would prove exactly the same “point” about exactly the same government’s ignorance of a hundred other slang terms nobody bothers writing columns about.
Words do not carry their birth certificates around with them for the rest of their lives. They get borrowed, stripped of context, and repurposed by whoever finds them useful, and that is true whether the word came from a 19th century prison camp, a Malay spiritual belief, a crack house, or a Harlem ballroom. Meaning migrates. Insisting that Mnangagwa’s handlers are somehow guilty of endorsing a subculture they have never engaged with, simply because a word once belonged to that subculture is a vanity argument dressed up as cultural analysis, built backwards from a conclusion Tendai already wanted to reach.
If ignorance of etymology were actually the crime Tendai claims it is, he would need to write the same outraged column every time a politician anywhere used “based,” “deadline,” “running amok,” or “standing on business.” He never will, because those examples do not serve the story he is trying to tell.
Kumbirai Thierry Nhamo || Social Justice Activist
Email: kumbiraithierryn@gmail.com
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